But she remembered that Gwenda had given her son his first little Sunday suit; and that, before Jimmy came, when Essy was in bed, crying with the face-ache, she had knocked at her door and said, “What is it, Essy?  Can I do anything for you?” She could hear her saying it now.

Essy’s memory was like that.

She had thought of Gwenda just then because she heard the sound of Dr.
Rowcliffe’s motor car tearing up the Dale.

* * * * *

The woman in the other room heard it too.  She had heard its horn hooting on the moor road nearly a mile away.

She raised her hand and listened.  It hooted again, once, twice, placably, at the turning of the road, under Karva.  She shivered at the sound.

It hooted irritably, furiously, as the car tore through the village.  Its lamps swung a shaft of light over the low garden wall.

At the garden gate the car made a shuddering pause.

Gwenda’s face and all her body listened.  A little unborn, undying hope quivered in her heart always at that pausing of the car at her gate.

It hardly gave her time for one heart-beat before she heard the grinding of the gear as the car took the steep hill to Upthorne.

But she was always taken in by it.  She had always that insane hope that the course of things had changed and that Steven had really stopped at the gate and was coming to her.

* * * * *

It was insanity, for she knew that Rowcliffe would never come to see her in the evening now.  After his outburst, more than five years ago, there was no use pretending to each other that they were safe.  He had told her plainly that, if she wanted him to hold out, he must never be long alone with her at any time, and he must give up coming to see her late at night.  It was much too risky.

“When I can come and see you that way,” he had said, “it’ll mean that I’ve left off caring.  But I’ll look in every Wednesday if I can.  Every Wednesday as long as I live.”

He had come now and then, not on a Wednesday, but “that way.”  He had not been able to help it.  But he had left longer and longer intervals between.  And he had never come ("that way”) since last year, when his second child was born.

Nothing but life or death would bring Rowcliffe out in his car after nightfall.  Yet the thing had her every time.  And it was as if her heart was ground with the grinding and torn with the tearing of the car.

Then she said to herself, “I must end it somehow.  It’s horrible to go on caring like this.  He was right.  It would be better not to see him at all.”

And she began counting the days and the hours till Wednesday when she would see him.

LIX

Wednesday was still the Vicar’s day for visiting his parish.  It was also Rowcliffe’s day for visiting his daughter.  But the Vicar was not going to change it on that account.  On Wednesday, if it was a fine afternoon, she was always sure of having Rowcliffe to herself.